Email & Calendar Project Update

The Email and Calendar Team is focused on increasing the pace of progress on a number of activities. Currently, these activities include:

Decommissioning of the Google Team Edition domain where approximately 130 HMC staff, faculty and students have accounts, created more than three years ago, to allow for collaboration of content and sharing of documents. Eliminating this domain will simplify our new Google Apps for Education deployment by allowing the from-address currently shown to recipients of email messages sent from the Google Apps domain to exclude the “g” in username@g.hmc.edu, will be shown as username@hmc.edu.Target for shutdown of Google Apps Team Edition is end of January.

Creation of the MS Office365 tenancy, and creation of CIS MT and USG accounts to begin the first steps in learning about user provisioning and functions or features of this email and calendar cloud service. Because this is a very new offering for Microsoft, the licensing and activation process has taken 10 weeks. In parallel to the processing of licenses, the team was able to work with MS toward completing the Technical Review and Deployment Readiness Tool.Target for CIS MT and USG account creation is first week of February.

Migrations of faculty email accounts from mailbox-01, Odin, and Thuban mail systems continue. These migrations have been completed via high-touch, in-person support from the CIS User Support Group. Our current count is (12) faculty members migrated in the months of October, November and December. In November, the project team was able to meet with technology representatives from Computer Science and Math to discuss mail routing, and confirm that the new cloud provided services would not impact mail flow to department mail servers.Target for mailbox-01 shutdown of email service for faculty is March.

Investigation of calendaring functions available within Google Apps, which includes administration of group calendars and import of common campus calendars. Once the Office365 service is operating, the team will shift to integration issues between the two clouds, in addition to calendaring clients and connectors.Target for understanding and documenting integration issues is end of February.

Tracking of function or feature inquiries related to email, calendar and other compatible collaboration applications. For each inquiry, the team determines if a reasonable solution is available with existing tools or by moderate process changes, allowing the item to be addressed at a later project phase or if the inquiry indicates a significant change to email communications or calendaring which would require significant technical accommodations or additional resources, causing the team to escalate the issue for decisions on project scope changes. These inquiries should be emailed to helpdesk@hmc.edu for tracking and communications via a ticket with the project team.

The team will continue to post project update items to the site tracking our activities. website (on Google Sites)